According to the latest studies of Experian® Hitwise®, the top online competitive intelligence service, Googlestands in the primary position among all the search engines that have been used in the United States for a period of four weeks that ended on 27 August 2011. Google, which continues to be the most popular search engines across the world, claims 65.09 percent of the total U.S. search conducted within the above-mentioned time period. It is followed by Yahoo! Search with 15.89 percent and Bing with 13.10 percent. The other search engines, a total that comes up to 64, comes with 5.92 percent.

When you come to think of it, there is hardly anything surprising about this ranking. Google has succeeded in keeping its top-most position for years now. While the other search engines vie for the second position, appearing in the top pages of Google undoubtedly is most beneficial for online businesses.

Yet another finding from Experian® Hitwise® was regarding the length of the search words. While single keywords still top the charts with 26.26 percent, there has been an increase of 3 percent in the use of key phrases with an average of five to eight words when compared to that of July 2011. An interesting point to note is that key phrases that come up to four words have found a slight decline in use of 1 percent during the said duration.

For websites aiming for a local market this is good news, at least in the United States. And for those websites with single keywords, this is bad news as it just means they have to strengthen up their marketing strategies to fight with thousands of other websites with the same keyword. However, when it comes to visitors with real intention to make a purchase, the trend is moving to longer key phrases that bring them faster results.